Another View: Drones beat the alternatives

A U.S. drone is shown.

The U.S. drone strikes that target suspected terrorists abroad come with risks: They can kill innocent civilians. They violate the sovereignty of other nations and can turn people there against the United States. They grant unreviewed power to the president to assassinate anyone he determines is a terrorist leader abroad, including American citizens.

And, as the demonstrators who repeatedly interrupted Thursday's confirmation hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan showed, the strikes raise knotty questions about whether a program of remote-control warfare and assassination squares with U.S. values.

But for all the controversy, the drone attacks have this going for them: They are effective, and the other options are worse.

President Obama has dramatically expanded the use of drones, ordering more than 360 strikes, up from roughly 50 during the Bush administration. These strikes have significantly weakened al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The administration is following a similar model by intensifying drone attacks against al-Qaeda offshoots in Yemen and Somalia.

This is messy. But what are the other options?

Leave terrorists alone, free to operate from havens abroad? The foolishness of that approach was exposed by the 9/11 attacks, planned at well-known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.

Use American ground troops to root them out? The price is needless casualties, higher risk of failure and equal likelihood of alienating local populations.

Employ conventional airstrikes? These are less precise and far more dangerous to foreign civilians. Although drones kill civilians, the "collateral damage" rate has dropped from more than 50% during the Bush administration to about 10% now, according to the New America Foundation.

Because of their successes, drone strikes have proved popular here at home and won bipartisan political support. But the fact that the targeted killing program is effective and popular is no excuse for not making it more transparent or subjecting it to the sort of checks that are common in a democracy.

The drone program has long operated in a sort of gray zone, widely known but with its details rarely acknowledged or explained by the White House. Secrecy has been especially intense surrounding the strikes that killed three U.S. citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born man who became an al-Qaeda leader in Yemen and who authorities said organized several attempts to kill Americans.

A 16-page legal memo, leaked days before Brennan's confirmation hearing, makes a reasonable case for targeting the tiny number of Americans such as al-Awlaki who have joined forces with the enemy. The memo limits targeted assassinations to "a senior operational leader" of al-Qaeda, or one of its affiliates, outside the United States who pose an imminent threat and can't be captured. It implies that the president must approve the killing, which is Obama's practice, but that provision should be codified to prevent abuse in unforeseen future circumstances.

The memo also falls short in rejecting any role for judicial oversight, on the grounds that there's "no appropriate judicial forum" for evaluating the issues. Perhaps not, and courts shouldn't be injected into battlefield decision-making.

But an appropriate forum is easy to create. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, for instance, grants warrants - sometimes on an emergency basis - for wiretaps that would otherwise be impractically difficult to obtain. Is wiretapping a citizen worse than killing him? A similar court could review kill lists of Americans in non-imminent situations.

That could go a long way toward calming fears about future abuse. But for the moment, as Brennan reminded the panel, the United States remains "at war with al-Qaeda and its associated forces," which "still seek to carry out deadly strikes against our homeland and our citizens." As long as that remains the case, the drones should keep flying.

---USA Today

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Another View: Drones beat the alternatives

The U.S. drone strikes that target suspected terrorists abroad come with risks: They can kill innocent civilians. They violate the sovereignty of other nations and can turn people there against the